StarStruck is a fast, lightweight, and elegant star rating system. It works with any WordPress site and is a breeze to setup. Your visitors can then rate a comment, post, or page with a click of a star.

It’s a great way to engage with your visitors and see which comments/posts/pages are most popular. Then take action based on overall data collected. It’s so good, we use it on AppThemes.com (See example here. Scroll to the bottom).

How do I verify my website is configured correctly?

How can I preview what my site will look like in Google?

It usually takes a few weeks before Google will show the star ratings in their search results. If you’d like to confirm everything is working correctly, you can Fetch your Website as Google. This is a tool that allows you to test how Google views your website which should show you the star ratings in action.

How long does it take for rich snippets to be visible?

Once you’ve installed the plugin, Google will discover it the next time they crawl your site (although it may take some time for rich snippets to appear in search results, if they do choose to display rich snippets for your site).

The star ratings don’t show up in Google

It takes time for Google to re-crawl your site and for rich snippets to appear in their search results. If it’s already been a few weeks and you tested your site’s markup and ran the Fetch as Google tool per above and they still don’t show up, read their FAQ.

Are there any filters or hooks?

Yes. There are several filters built into the plugin. These allows developers to modify the StarStruck content before it’s returned to the browser.

starstruck_content – executes before StarStruck is displayed on the post/page.starstruck_comment – executes before StarStruck is displayed on each comment.starstruck_mini – executes before StarStruck is displayed as read-only values.starstruck_sidebar – executes before StarStruck is displayed in the sidebar.startruck_template – executes before a StarStruck template (top ratings or content) is displayed.

The best way to figure out how filters work is by looking at the source code. You’ll be able to see the exact parameters and how the function works.

Have a suggestion for a new filter or action? Let us know in the comments below or our support forum.

Installation Guide

It’s easy to install the plugin. Just follow the steps below. What’s most important is to verify that your theme has microdata setup correctly. Once you’ve done that, see the FAQ tab for more guidelines.

Download the plugin from your customer dashboard

Login to your WordPress site and visit “Plugins” => “Add New” in the sidebar

Click on “Upload” and then “Choose File”. Browse to the starstruck.zip.

Click on the “Install Now” button

On the plugins page, scroll down and find “StarStruck. Click on the “Activate” link.

You’ll then be redirected to the options page

Visit your site and view a blog post. At the bottom, you should see the star ratings

Setting up the Microdata

If you site has already been configured with microdata, StarStruck will automatically work once you accumulate ratings.

Google provides a free testing tool to see if everything is configured properly. If so, you’ll see the star ratings in the results.

If not, chances are you need to add microdata tags to your WordPress theme. The exact tags depend on the content StarStruck is displayed on. For this example, we’ll use the BlogPosting item type.

If you’re familiar with editing theme code this will be easy to do. You’ll need to modify your theme’s single.php (or possibly content.php or loop.php) file. There might even be a plugin that does this for you without having to edit the theme files.

Need my listings to have the same kind of rating as shown in Vantage 4 Demo – I have been told in support, 2 different plugins, one being this one. this was just as bad and does not work. Support is terrible and not sure anybody actually knows what they are doing around here. This thing only shows the star rating on listing and you can’t control placement.

Alas, can’t get it to work with a shortcode – both inserting into PHP directly and post body. This is even more misleading since all the necessary settings are present in the admin. Posted a question on the support forum but only silence thus far.

Comments (200)

With PHP 7 is become an error “Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; STARSTRUCK_Top_Ratings has a deprecated constructor in /***************/wp-content/plugins/starstruck/starstruck-widgets.php on line 26”

So i hope an Update will be come out shortly or i hope for an Refound!

Star rating is now showing in Google search and I posted a thread for my questions five days before. I didn’t get any answer. I am really surprise about the support of the paid Plugin. If it does not work and have no support, I want to get the refund. How can I get refund?

i must say im not realy affraid from your Plugin and my Big Wish is had never buy this Plugin, because in my Eyes it was Money what i can use better because i dont use your Plugin. Your Plugin is not made for Feature and it’s outdated 🙁

Hi, yes I understand what you mean. However the reason for my reply is because there has been a lot of changes made to the theme and improved the code substantially from version 3.0.5 to version 4.2.2.

However I have not tested this plugin with the latest Vantage version 4.2.2, so I really can’t confirm.

Ya know, I would gladly purchase the new version except that the entire layout has changed, and the plugin I use for an essential element on my homepage (Home Control for Vantage) doesn’t work the same on Vantage 4.x

…or at least so I thought.

I revisited the topic when it came up here, and it seems that feature does work how I’d like it too. The developer just failed in their job of explaining that.

Anyway, if you can’t confirm this plug resolves the issue with 3.0.5 and you can’t confirm that it resolves the issue with 4.2.2, then what – if any – version CAN you confirm that this plugin resolves the issue in question?

For future reference, this plugin definitely doesn’t help resolve issues with structured data on Vantage 3.0.5. I bought, installed, and activated it, and then realized that I had to enable it for Listings. And I went from having 10 errors and 18 warnings to 28 errors and 75 warnings in Google’s Structured Data Tool (https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/).

We received 4 errors from Google search console. There are:
1. Invalid object type for field “itemReviewed”
2. Missing reviewed item name
3. Rating value is out of range
4. Value in property “reviewCount” must be positive

1 and 2 seems to me serious issues. Error message from Google structure data testing tool:
– The review does not have a reviewed item with a name specified.
– Service is not a known valid target type for the itemReviewed property.

Perhaps, we can solve 3 and 4 by givng 1 rating manually. But this is not good way to solve an issue. Can you please find an better automatic solution.